100 Dickens Drabbles
by Haiza Tyri
Summary: I am writing one hundred 100-word stories from the point of view of minor characters from Dickens' books.
1. Didn't seem right

**I'm following a blog meme going around just now, in which you write 100 pieces of fan fiction, all in your favorite fandom, and each one has to incorporate one of 100 themes or prompts. I chose Charles Dickens' works and decided to add my own twists to it as well: mine will each be exactly 100 words, and they will each be from the POV of a minor character in one of Dickens' books. **

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Prompt #22: Enemies. 

_Barsad, A Tale of Two Cities_

He'd been had by that scoundrel lawyer twice now. If ever there was a man who ought to have his head chopped off by that infernal guillotine, it was that scoundrel lawyer. After the first time, Barsad would have been glad to hand him over. After the second time, he would have done the deed himself. And now here he was watching that scoundrel lawyer head for that infernal guillotine in a rickety tumbrel, and here he was quelling the cheers around him. Didn't seem right, that his enemy had become the man he most admired. Just didn't seem right.


	2. Intersection

Prompt #65: Passing. 

_Homeless woman, Bleak House_

The night was cold, and she trudged on in the dark. Maybe she wondered why she didn't just throw herself into the river as she passed over it. She hardly noticed the passing carriage until it stopped with a shout and a man sprang from it. He came toward her; she shrank back as he peered into her face with a look of expectation. It faded, replaced by disappointment, then bracing determination. She was left behind with the impression of a woman's face looking back at her from the disappearing carriage, a face as miserable and wild as her own.

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_This is taken from a very minor scene in _Bleak House,_ when Esther Summerson is rushing with Mr Bucket to find her mother, and Mr Bucket jumps out of the carriage to peer into the face of a woman passing to see if it is Lady Dedlock._


	3. What's it all about?

Prompt #95: Christmas. 

_Jo, Bleak House_

Sometimes, when he had enough food in him to think of something besides the gnawing ache, Jo wondered what it was all about. Why the look of things changed when it got cold, why people started wearing bright clothes, why buildings put on green branches that didn't belong to them, why there was music everywhere he never heard any other time. He had a vague idea it was something about a baby. Once someone told him about a baby so poor it was born in an animal stall. It sounded better than Tom-All-Alone's. He wished he could be that baby.


	4. Let it strike

Prompt #68: Lightening

_Mademoiselle Hortense, Bleak House_

The cold grass is most grateful to my feet, which have been often hurting from those accursed shoes. I know the gentleman and his young ladies are looking at me strangely as I walk away from them without my shoes, but I care nothing for them. Except one of the young ladies—she resembles my lady, but she is not so high. She looks _tres aimable._ She would not behave as my lady does.

The rain going down my back does not cool my fury. Lightening strikes in the distance. Let it strike! I wish it would strike my lady.


	5. Learned gentleness

**Dickensblog is also running a fiction challenge, to write about what happens to characters five years after the Dickens novel ends. Some of the 100 prompts allow the writer to choose the theme, so I am doing 5 Years Later here.**

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Prompt #98: Writer's Choice: 5 Years Later

_Jenny Wren, Our Mutual Friend_

Jenny had learned gentleness. That was what Mr Riah noticed. Friendship with a peculiar young man called Sloppy had done that to her. Of course much of it was due to her sweet friend Lizzie Wrayburn, but much of it was also the influence of that Sloppy. If she snapped at him, he was so meek and hurt that she soon stopped snapping at him. Mentally he was not all there, but he was so responsible and good-hearted that it shamed her to treat him as a child, as she had her irresponsible father. Mr Riah predicted a wedding soon…


	6. Footsteps of Oppression

Prompt #94: Independence

_Ernest Defarge, A Tale of Two Cities_

It was all supposed to be so different. Down with the aristos—when the people were free from their accursed control, the whole world was to be different. A man was to be able to go where he liked, molested by no one, stopped by no one. He was to have all the work and bread he could handle and never be frivolously accused and falsely imprisoned. What had happened to the beautiful new world Ernest and his wife planned? What had happened to their dreams of independence from oppression? How had oppression followed upon the footsteps of the people?


	7. His Little Girl

Prompt #25: Strangers

_Nemo, Bleak House_

They pass in the street. He doesn't know his little girl. He never knew he had a little girl. That time when he was a man and the beautiful Miss Barbary looked on him with approval is so far behind and drowned in a haze of opium that he thinks it was a dream. Now he goes from opium den to pub, sometimes alert enough to give his last change to the streetsweeper before he spends it on opium, and he will never know that the lovely young lady who passed him in the street once is his little girl.


	8. No eye is better than an evil eye

Prompt #82: Blind

_The blind man's dog, A Christmas Carol_

The blind man's dog was a little confused. Yes, this was definitely the unpleasant human he had often protected his master from. The scent was unmistakable. The old human's scent had always been sour and rotten, the very thing that told a dog here was someone to keep away from if he didn't want to find himself running away whimpering with his tail between his legs. It was still the same scent, but it was different. As he stood sniffing and trying to figure it out, he heard the rattling sound that made his master happy. The human had changed.

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**The blind man's dog is mentioned in the first chapter of "A Christmas Carol."**


	9. Sir Arrogant Numbskull

Prompt #76: Shattered

_Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr Boythorn, Bleak House_

Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, was, though few would have had the courage to tell him so, a pompous old fool, arrogant, bigoted, so entrenched in his ways it was doubtful whether God Almighty could have convinced him of their folly. In time he became a weak, shattered old fool and so died. But it was when he was shattered that he became a good man, when his pride was dashed to pieces that he showed the depth and warmth his nature was capable of. The one man who had the courage to call him a fool no longer wished to.


	10. The Replacement

Prompt #7: Days

_Rosa, Bleak House_

When it all comes out, as indeed it must, Rosa finally understands the peculiarities of those last few days, of her lady's whole connection with herself. A daughter, a little illegitimate daughter about her own age or older, for whom she was an innocent replacement. Rosa has been taught to view such secrets with horror, but there is far more regret, love, and pity for her lady. Proud as everyone called her, her lady always treated her with affection, and wicked as perhaps she was, there was also a deep strain of sorrow which Rosa has never understood, until now.


	11. Lingering Splendor

Prompt #16: Purple

_Nancy, Oliver Twist  
_

She remembered the days when she was one of those ragged children, when her hands were purple with cold and the beast gnawed in her stomach. And then she remembered Bill, a rough, vibrant boy with a masterful way about him who decided she was worth taking in hand. How splendid her Bill was in those days! Like the Artful Dodger, only better, a swaggerer, a boaster, and one who could make his boasts come true. There was still a lingering of that remembered splendor on him that made her stay after he hit her and come back every night.


	12. A Beginning Is A Very Delicate Time

Prompt #1: Beginnings

_Sydney Carton, Sr., A Tale of Two Cities_

Mr Sydney Carton, Sr., barrister and drunk, gave no thought to his son's beginnings. A sickly baby, to be passed off to a nurse and ignored until he was old enough to be interesting, when it was said he was clever. Then he could be entertainment for Carton and his friends at the pub. His father never taught him to apply himself or to seek to be more than clever, that his life could have a purpose of its own beyond drinking and being clever for others' edification. Carton, Sr., died before he saw how wasted beginnings led to wasted life.

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**The title of this drabble, "A Beginning Is A Very Delicate Time" comes from the science fiction movie "Dune." I'm not sure if it's also a quote from the book by Frank Herbert or not.**


	13. A Good Father

Prompt #27: Parents

_Jesse Hexum, Our Mutual Friend_

He was a good father, was Jesse Hexum. Didn't he provide a good living for his motherless family? Didn't he fashion a cradle for that baby girl with his own hands with wood he'd scavenged with his own hands? He'd never laid a hand on his Lizzie, and he'd taught her how to provide for herself after he was gone. Sure, he smacked the boy around a bit, but that was for his own good, to teach him what was right for a boy of his place in life. That was what a good father did.

Charley begged to differ.


	14. Sometimes Logic is Wrong

Prompt #77: Rebirth

_Mortimer Lightwood, Our Mutual Friend_

Eugene had been reborn in his struggle with death. That was the strangest thing to Mortimer. Logic would have said that the best thing for a young man was to stay healthy, to maintain the tenor of his life, not to be violently assaulted and come within inches of death. But on the other side of death, Eugene became a far better man than he had ever been. He had been drawn through death by loving hands, and he had been reborn. Spending hours trying to puzzle it out, Mortimer couldn't quite make it make sense. But it was good.


	15. The Man of Business

Prompt #17: Brown

_Mr. Lorry, A Tale of Two Cities_

Mr Lorry had to confess himself to have perjured himself. The man of business, to whom everything was to be nothing but business, had allowed himself to stray away from the strict pursuit of business into the sentimentality he thought had been put away from him years ago. But seeing that blundering bull, that coarse, indelicate fellow Striver thinking to press his attentions on sweet, pretty Miss Manette had brought it all out and caused him to make his former self a perjurer. He had grown quite hot, had rushed to her defense. Even now he couldn't quite regret it.

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**Note: Miss Pross calls Mr Lorry "You in brown!" I love it. I love brown.**


	16. Undiminished

**Author's Note: This is in response to Gina on Dickensblog's challenge to "take a passage from any Dickens novel and rewrite it with a ghost in it." (http:/dickensblog . typepad . com/dickensblog/2010/10/the-dickensblog-halloweenfic-challenge . html) It's considerably longer than 100 words (about 250, actually), because about half of it is taken directly from a scene by Dickens, and the other half is my ghostlike insertion. **

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Prompt #20: Colorless. 

_Sir Leicester, Lady Dedlock, Bleak House_

The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady's picture. Some nights, drowsing and alone, he thinks she comes down out of her picture and sits by the fire in her old way. In her old way and yet not, for the color has gone from her hair, skin, eyes, clothes, and she is only a glimmer in the firelight, looking at him, with a kind of grief on her face. When she leaves him, he fancies he hears a step on the Ghost's Walk. Once he says to her, "No complaint, my dear. Never any complaint against you. My respect and affection are undiminished." And she nods, more a drooping of the head than a nod, and he wonders if he sees tears glinting on his proud lady's cheek in the firelight. She rises, passes by him. He almost thinks he can feel her hand against his cheek. He does not hear the step on the Ghost Walk again. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him.


	17. Beacon

Prompt #73: Light

_Young John Chivery, Amy Dorrit: Little Dorrit_

Like a beacon, Miss Amy is. She shines in this place where gentlemen come, proud, angry, and broken in spirit, and stay, dejected and used to it. She is the centre of her family, the way a hearth is the centre of a home, with a small, glowing fire right down inside her. When she goes away to that old lady's house to sew, she takes her light with her, leaving the Marshalsea a little darker, but it's sure she brings her light to the old lady's house and makes it brighter. She'd never believe it if you told her.


	18. Between, Always Outside, and Serene

**Author's Note: These three drabbles are from the point of view of major characters rather than minor characters because they are a commission. Gina Dalfonzo of Dickensblog was doing a pledge drive to help raise money for the restoration of several of Dickens' manuscripts by the Victoria and Albert Museum, and my bit was to write drabbles certain pledges, based on the pledger's request. She requested I write anything about Arthur Clennam, Sydney Carton, and Eugene Wrayburn. [We share favorite characters, it appears.] So here they are:**

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Prompt #2: Middles

_Arthur Clennam, Pet Meagles Little Dorrit_

**Between**

In Marseilles, the sun shone bright on a golden head and a sweet face, and Arthur Clennam wondered at his own happiness. His life was bounded by harshness, guilt in the past, uncertainty in the future, and here he was trapped between them, as he'd been his whole life, trapped in a world of someone else's making, hemmed by severity he could not understand, enslaved to a life he hated, with nothing to look forward to but more anger and more guilt. But today the sun shone in Marseilles on a bright head and bright eyes, and he was happy.

Prompt #5: Outsides

_Sydney Carton, Lucie Manette, Two Cities_

**Always Outside**

[Inspired by a scene in the 1935 Ronald Coleman movie; I'm not sure if it was in the book or not.]

He stands outside the house, snow falling on his hat and his hands. It's ridiculous, standing outside under a streetlamp in the cold and dark, but he supposes he's always been a bit ridiculous. It's certain he's always been outside. At university he hung about the outsides of things, allowed in momentarily to do someone else's work, then stumbling back out again. At the bar he's even outside his own practice, because it's Stryver's practice, though he does the work. And now he is outside her house, and if he has ever been contented being outside, he is content now.

Prompt #14: Green

_Eugene Wrayburn, Our Mutual Friend_

**Serene**

It's a serene world, a rhythmic one, rowing alone and leisurely down the river. The sound of the oars in the water and the feeling in the shoulders of pulling them are soothing in their repetition. The vivid countryside spreads out like a universe around him. He never thought he cared much for the country, but this slow process through it makes him see things he has never seen before, the way a tree silhouettes against the sky, the way the fields each have their own particular shade of green. He wonders if Lizzie would let him show her this.


	19. Sisters

Prompt #61: Winter.

_Jenny, Bleak House  
_

Jenny trudges through the slushy snow, wondering what she's doing. Why would she decide to help this stranger, who has been to her house only once before and has nothing to do with her? Her husband agreed because the lady paid her, but Jenny doesn't care about payment. All she cares is that the wild misery in her eyes makes her a sister to poor Jenny. Jenny knows that misery. It seems like she has felt it every day of her life. The lady is a fine lady; Jenny is a nobody under her feet. But something makes them sisters.


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